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Back Issues #703 - 705/ 710 - 713
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News * Analysis * Research * Action
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- AFIB No. 734, June 28, 2006 -
FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS & PRISONERS OF WAR!
END THE OCCUPATIONS!
ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!
All intelligence operations in the political sphere outrun their asserted purposes. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of military intelligence. The formal justifications--preparations for emergency troop call-outs and the monitoring of threats to the military function itself--serve as little more than pretexts. The scope and intensity of the field operations of the Army's intelligence personnel established all too clearly that, as in the case of the Bureau's surveillance system, they were at root forms of aggression against legitimate political expression. -- Frank J. Donner, The Age of Surveillance: The Aims and Methods of America's Political Intelligence System [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980] pp. 304-305.
Contents: Number 734
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 736/July 5, 2006
ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN: Number 735/July 2, 2006
Back Issues #703 - 705/ #710 - 713
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WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
Web: http://www.wsws.org/
E-Mail: editor@wsws.org
- Wednesday, 28 June 2006 -
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1. BUSH, CHENEY THREATEN NEW YORK TIMES
OVER EXPOSURE OF SURVEILLANCE PROGRAMS
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News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/time-j28.shtml
By Patrick Martin
In a brazen effort to intimidate the media and halt any further exposures of illegal US government spying, President Bush, Vice President Cheney and several Republican congressional leaders have denounced the New York Times and suggested that the newspaper could face criminal charges for its report on US government surveillance of international financial transactions.
The Times reported June 21 on its web site and then in its June 22 print edition that the Department of the Treasury had secretly accumulated an enormous database on international financial transactions by obtaining access to the records of the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, a Belgium-based clearinghouse for major banks and other financial institutions. Similar reports were published by the Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal June 22, and then more generally throughout the US media.
Bush used a pro-war photo-op at the White House Monday to attack the media reports, saying, "the disclosure of this program is disgraceful. We're at war with a bunch of people who want to hurt the United States of America, and for people to leak that program, and for a newspaper to publish it, does great harm to the United States of America."
Cheney singled out the New York Times by name. "Some of the press, in particular the New York Times, have made the job of defending against further terrorist attacks more difficult by insisting on publishing detailed information about vital national security programs," he told a Republican fundraising luncheon in Nebraska.
Connecting the latest exposure to previous revelations about massive domestic wiretapping and data mining by the National Security Agency (NSA), Cheney added, "What is doubly disturbing for me is that not only have they gone forward with these stories, but they've been rewarded for it, for example, in the case of the terrorist surveillance program, by being awarded the Pulitzer Prize for outstanding journalism. I think that is a disgrace."
White House press secretary Tony Snow denied the obvious truth that the comments by Bush and Cheney were intended to intimidate critics and silence the media. "It's not designed to have a chilling effect," he said. "But the New York Times and other news organizations ought to think long and hard about whether a public's right to know, in some cases, might overwrite somebody's right to live."
The claim that these illegal spying operations, which target millions of ordinary people in the US and around the world, are driven by the imperative of defending the American people from terrorist attack is a lie. Like the Patriot Act, the Homeland Security Department and the assertion of unchecked presidential powers, these programs are directed against the democratic rights of the people. Those who have implemented them know full well that the greatest potential threat to the American corporate elite which they serve comes from among the American working population, not bands of Islamic terrorists.
The accumulation of information on international financial transactions is simply one more element in the Bush administration's creation of a massive, centralized database on the American people, an indispensable part in the preparations for widespread domestic repression against those opposed to the war in Iraq and the government's right-wing social policies.
There is not the slightest indication that any terrorist attack has been exposed, disrupted or even delayed as a result of the surveillance of banking transactions. Nor has there been any reporting on some of the more curious financial operations that preceded the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. These include the alleged transfer of $100,000 from intelligence operatives of Pakistan--now the Bush administration's close ally--to presumed suicide hijacker Mohammed Atta, and the widely reported dumping of stock in United Airlines and American Airlines in the days leading up to 9/11.
The barrage against the Times is a calculated maneuver by the White House that bears the imprint of Bush's chief political hatchet-man, Karl Rove. His modus operandi is, whenever the administration is caught in a crime, to escalate the provocation and smear critics as apologists and even allies of terrorism.
While neither Bush nor Cheney explicitly called for prosecution of the Times, this demand was raised by Congressman Peter King (Republican of New York), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, who began the orchestrated series of attacks on the Times.
Like Bush and Cheney, King described the publication of the report as "disgraceful." But he went further, declaring, "We're at war, and for the Times to release information about secret operations and methods is treasonous." He said he would urge Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to "begin an investigation and prosecution of the New York Times--the reporters, the editors and the publisher."
In a McCarthy-style diatribe delivered on Fox News, King added, "Nobody elected the New York Times to do anything. And the New York Times is putting its own arrogant, elitist, left-wing agenda before the interests of the American people." He made it clear that the venom directed at the Times was as much for its exposure of the NSA spying as for the most recent report on surveillance of banking transactions. "The Times is more of a recidivist," he said, using a term usually reserved for repeat criminals.
On Monday, King actually sent a letter to Gonzales seeking an investigation into whether the publication of the report on banking surveillance violated the Espionage Act.
As with its political offensive in support of the disastrous and deeply unpopular war in Iraq, the White House clearly banks on the complicity of the Democrats and the cowardice of the media to allow it to brazen out a defense of its illegal spying.
In contrast to the revelations of systematic monitoring of international and domestic telephone calls, in defiance of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, there has been little or no congressional criticism of the surveillance of bank transfers, which was also conducted without obtaining warrants from any court and without legislative approval.
While Bush claimed, "Congress was briefed, and what we did was fully authorized under the law," it seems that only the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, a Republican, and one or two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee were notified. Congresswoman Jane Harman, the senior Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said she received her first briefing on the program only recently, after the White House learned that the New York Times was preparing to publish a report on the subject. "They knew it was going to leak," she said, adding that the program should have had greater oversight.
Significantly, in keeping with the cowardly and complicit role of the Democrats, she said nothing publicly about the financial surveillance operation when she was briefed, and refuses to criticize the program itself.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid, the top Senate Democrat, said the banking surveillance program "doesn't seem to be based on the same shaky legal analysis" as the NSA spying. Like Harman, he criticized not the spying itself, but the decision of the administration "to ignore its duty to keep Congress informed."
Senator Charles Schumer of New York issued a statement essentially supporting the program, saying, "Allowing law enforcement to examine bank records in order to stop the flow of money to terrorists makes a lot of sense, and this program appears to allow for just that."
Another senior Senate Democrat, Joseph Biden of Delaware, said he would have preferred that the Times not expose the operation, although he did not support any effort to penalize the newspaper for its actions.
Both the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times wrote defensively about their decision to publish, in terms that revealed how both newspapers were placed under government pressure to pull back from any reporting on the assault on democratic rights.
In a letter posted on the New York Times web site Sunday, Executive Editor Bill Keller wrote, "Most Americans seem to support extraordinary measures in defense against this extraordinary threat" of terrorism, but he added there were concerns "over the legality of the government's actions and over the adequacy of oversight." Keller noted that those who wrote the US Constitution "rejected the idea that it is wise, or patriotic, to always take the President at his word, or to surrender to the government important decisions about what to publish."
Los Angeles Times Executive Editor Dean Baquet commented, "History has taught us that the government is not always being honest when it cites secrecy as a reason not to publish. No one believes, in retrospect, that there was any true reason to withhold the Pentagon Papers, although the government fought vigorously to keep them from being published..."
Meanwhile, a further revelation of government spying appeared in Newsweek on the weekend. The magazine reported that the Treasury Department had used a largely unpublicized provision of the USA Patriot Act to obtain over 28,000 financial records, "including thousands of bank accounts, wire transfers and other transactions involving individuals, companies and nonprofit organizations inside the United States." While nearly 4,400 individuals were targeted for this financial snooping, the results from a law enforcement perspective were meager: 90 indictments, 79 arrests, and 10 convictions, none of them apparently for terrorism.
Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.
*****
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2. 'BIG BROTHER' BUSH AND CONNECTING THE DATA DOTS
The Total Information Awareness program was killed in 2003,
but its spawn present bigger threats to privacy
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LOS ANGELES TIMES
Opinion
June 24, 2006
By Jonathan Turley
THE DISCLOSURE this week of a secret databank operation tracking international financial transactions has caused renewed concerns about civil liberties in the United States. But this program is just the latest in a series of secret surveillance programs, databanks and domestic operations justified as part of the war on terror.
Disclosed individually over the course of the last year, they have become almost routine. Yet, when considered collectively, they present a far more troubling picture, and one that should be vaguely familiar.
Civil liberty-minded citizens may recall the president's plan to create the Total Information Awareness program, a massive databank with the ability to follow citizens in real time by their check-card purchases, bank transactions, medical bills and other electronic means. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, was assigned this task, but after its work was made public, Congress put a stop to it in September 2003 as a danger to privacy and civil liberties.
However, when Congress disbanded the Total Information Awareness program, it did not prohibit further research on such databanks, or even the use of individual databanks.
And, according to a recent study by the National Journal, the Bush administration used that loophole to break the program into smaller parts, transferring some parts to the National Security Agency, classifying the work and renaming parts of it as the Research Development and Experimental Collaboration program.
It was long suspected that Total Information Awareness survived, and the disclosure this week of another massive databank operation has only reinforced that fear. The spawn of DARPA seem to be turning up in secret programs spread throughout agencies.
The administration learned that it could not create a network of databanks in one comprehensive system, but it could achieve the same results by creating smaller systems that could be easily daisy-chained at a later date into the same kind of massive computer bank that Congress thought it had shut down. It is DARPA, albeit with assembly required for the ultimate user.
Consider some of the recent disclosures:
* A domestic surveillance program operated without warrants involving thousands of calls that are isolated by computers at the NSA.
* A massive databank that contains information on hundreds of millions of telephone calls of Americans that is described as the world's largest database.
* Access to information in a massive databank that carries 12.7 million messages each day on international financial transactions.
* Use of massive private databanks with access to an array of information on citizens, including at least 199 data-mining projects.
* Quiet support for a national registered-traveler program in which citizens voluntarily submit private information and subject themselves to background checks for faster passage through airport security. (The information would then be housed in a computer system accessible to the government.)
These computer databanks and programs are technically separate but collectively could exceed the dimensions of the DARPA program killed in 2003. Most of these systems have certain common characteristics, including the absence of congressional approval. Indeed, the recently disclosed financial transaction program was created by the Bush administration as an emergency program, but it has continued for years.
Although the administration has refused to involve the courts in such programs, it actually contracted out the role of oversight -- according to the New York Times, it hired a private auditing firm to make sure that the monitoring of financial transactions was not being misused. Such outsourcing of civil liberty protections is hardly what the framers foresaw when they created a system of checks and balances.
MOST OF these programs are designed to look for suspicious conduct from everyday transactions. By combining information, the government uses "link analysis" to find something suspicious among otherwise innocent-looking transactions. It also is a technique that necessarily exposes innocent citizens to constant forms of surveillance or monitoring -- the very danger of DARPA's Total Information Awareness program that Congress wanted to avoid.
It now appears that the administration has achieved by stealth what it could not achieve by persuasion in Congress: the creation of a computer network that could follow millions of citizens to reveal their movements and transactions.
It is all part of this administration's insatiable desire for information. With regard to its own conduct and information, the administration has fought against the notion of transparency -- from refusing to disclose meetings with lobbyists, to denying Congress information needed for oversight, to threatening journalists with prosecution for revealing secret programs such as the NSA domestic surveillance program.
Yet, when it comes to citizens, the administration demands total transparency to allow it to monitor everyday transactions and conduct.
It is perhaps the greatest danger that can face a free society: a government cloaked in secrecy with total information on its citizens.
For most of our history, one of the greatest protections for civil liberties has been the practical inability of the government to surveil a large number of citizens at one time. In the last couple of decades, those technological barriers have fallen away.
In the meantime, the Supreme Court has removed legal barriers to the government's acquisition of personal information by allowing it to obtain the records of banks, telephone companies and other businesses without a warrant. This combination of legal and technological changes has laid the foundation for a fishbowl society in which citizens can be objects of continual surveillance.
Americans have long been defined by our privacy values. We have fiercely defended what Justice Louis Brandeis called "our right to be left alone." It is only in the assurance of privacy that free thoughts and free exercise of rights can be truly exercised. Such privacy evaporates with doubt; it is why the Constitution seeks to avoid the chilling effect of uncertainty in government searches and seizures.
Yet, the problem has been that these programs have been revealed and analyzed in isolation. Each insular program has been defended in insular terms. It is just domestic telephone numbers or just international transactions. Citizens have become accustomed to a steady stream of secret programs and new forms of government monitoring. It is something that our fiercely independent ancestors would have never imagined.
Privacy is dying in America -- not with a fight but a yawn.
JONATHAN TURLEY is a law professor at George Washington University.
Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times
*****
TRUTHOUT
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Los Angeles CA, 90014
Editor, Marc Ash
Tel: 1.213.489.1971
E-mail: ma@truthout.com
- Wednesday, 28 June 2006 -
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3. AN IRAQI WITHDRAWAL FROM IRAQ
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Perspective
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/062806A.shtml
By Dahr Jamail
Recent days have found a media feeding frenzy at the trough of the "National Reconciliation" plan by the US puppet "prime minister" of Iraq, Nuri al-Maliki. This "plan" was clearly a political move orchestrated from within Pentagon and State Department circles in preparation for the upcoming November mid-term elections in the US and has effectively changed, on the ground in Iraq, approximately nothing.
Broadcast by the corporate media and lapped up by US politicians and other groups, the day after it was announced the "plan" had its key element - that of granting amnesty for resistance fighters, removed. Apparently, the "plan" aimed to show some sort of political progress in Iraq.
It is amazing to witness that people, even many within the anti-war movement in the US, seem willing to believe anything presented by Maliki, including this "plan." A man who was inserted into his position after Jack Straw and Condoleezza Rice visited Baghdad in order to brush Jaafari, the prime minister chosen by the supposedly-elected Iraqi parliament, aside. Do we need any clearer evidence of who pulls the strings of Maliki?
The aim of the "plan" seems to be to give the impression that the Iraqi resistance should cooperate with the occupiers and their puppet government, a regime which, rather than serving Iraqis, works diligently to serve themselves. This "plan" was offered by an illegitimate government that clearly does not serve the interest of the Iraqi people. For if this so-called Iraqi government truly represented the wishes of the vast majority of Iraqis, the first thing they would have done when they came into power would have been to demand a withdrawal of all foreign occupation forces and demand reparations from the occupiers.
Do we need any more proof after three devastating years of occupation that the "political process" in Iraq has solved nothing and remains a total failure?
Iraqi resistance groups rejected the "plan" because they do not recognize the Iraqi "government" as a legitimate entity. These same resistance groups understand that under international law, the current Iraqi "government" controls nothing outside of the "green zone," and its existence violates the Geneva Conventions. In addition, the Iraqi government's "army," composed of various sectarian and/or ethnic groups, rather than being an effective, cohesive military, is nothing more than a haphazard collage of militias and death squads loyal only to their own various militia or religious leaders.
This "army" has brought nothing but chaos, suffering and death to every city, town, village or institution it has visited, and while sectarian and ethnic politics are played out in the so-called Iraqi government, the agenda of the Bush administration rolls forward unabated.
One must look behind the media frenzy around the "plan" to get a clearer idea of what is actually occurring in Iraq.
I recently spoke with Antonia Juhasz, author of The Bush Agenda: Invading the World, One Economy at a Time. A foreign policy expert, Juhasz writes, "The corporations, the neoconservatives, and the George W. Bush administration are three interlocking groups with fluid demarcations. Iraq represents several things to these players: oil, wealth, regional power, and global power. Iraq presents them with the first opportunity for a truly imperial invasion [And] as president Bush has repeatedly said, Iraq is only the beginning"
At the World Peace Forum in Vancouver, Canada, Juhasz told me that the Bush/Cheney junta and their cronies are having great success in Iraq. "Iraq is producing and exporting almost as much oil as it was prior to the invasion," she said, "and Exxon, Chevron, Conoco, Shell, BP and Marathon are all profiting from it."
Juhasz added that if there isn't massive change in Iraq soon, all of the US imposed economic contracts (25-40 year contracts), will effectively eviscerate what is left of the demolished Iraqi economy. In two months, laws will be passed by the puppet government, and six months after this the contracts of the Western companies, (read "Big Oil") will be implemented.
"Production Sharing Agreements (PSA's) are what the Bush administration and the corporations they serve want," Juhasz told me, "This enables the US oil companies to have control and access to oil that they didn't have access to before the war. And as we all know, that is what this has been about all along."
She added that the permanent military bases in Iraq are to be used for providing security for the oil companies.
When one looks at the tragic situation on the ground in Iraq today, it is and always has been clear that the objective of the US military in Iraq has never had anything to do with providing security to the Iraqi people.
In contrast to the seemingly rosy "plan" presented by Maliki, I offer an update from my friend in the Sunni neighborhood of Adhamiya in Baghdad:
Habibi,
"I'm still living alone at home, with everybody in my family out of the critical area. For the 5th day the black crows (Al-Mahdi Army, Sadr's militia) have been trying to get inside Adhamiya, in vain, from all directions. The fighting has been continuous, from 8 o'clock at night until early in the mornings.
"Last night, the fighting was from all directions and started at 11:30 p.m. and ended at 3 o'clock in the morning. Six were killed yesterday in the southern part of our neighborhood. Anter Square, the main part of the city, is guarded by the Iraqi National Guard (Sunni Personnel) who were using heavy machine guns to defend the people of Adhamiya. In the other parts of Adhamiya, the river side was guarded by civilians of the Mujahedin. The fighting has been very severe, but the Shia militia did not get inside the area.
"Why do the Americans and the militias they are backing cut the wires of our electricity every day? Isn't it sufficient to have electricity less than four hours per day? Is that not enough suffering to please them? For the fifth time we have repaired the wires.
"The Mehdi and the Americans want people to leave the area but they will not succeed. We are ready to repair our electricity at any time and the transformers have been changed twice this month. We will not give up, no matter what. We will not give up our way of living. This is just a small part of the reality the people of Adhamiya are living."
Meanwhile, a refugee from Ramadi recently found his way to Baghdad. Imagine coming into a city seeking refuge where large districts, like the aforementioned, are under siege. The man, Ahmed, reported the following to my colleague Nora Barrows at KPFA radio about the condition in his city, which is being assaulted by US forces:
"There were many helicopters, and the market area was burned while the helicopters were shelling. For instance, there were clashes in the main street of Ramadi by the mosque. Most of the bullets and bombs were coming from the sky, and they burned many stores and cars that used to belong to civilians. When they attacked the market area, there was a car parked close by and it was shot and bombed. People said, "My life is worth more than a car," so they tried to stay indoors or they tried to take shelter inside a mosque. Anything that moved - cars, people, anything - they got bombed and shot at.
"The weapons of the American troops were very hard to identify. They have everything and they carry all kinds of weapons with them. You can see them carrying every kind of weapon they can, such as grenades, M-16s and many other kinds that we have never seen before. They use tear gas and grenades very often. For instance, there were two big tanks entering a very narrow street shelling everything: cars, houses, generators. They shot at whatever they could target. People could not look from the windows because of the [American] snipers. I saw the Americans in their tanks checking the areas. They were very hesitant and scared to leave their tank. They didn't even look from the tank's window because they were afraid of being attacked or shot at. Fighters were everywhere."
Things have grown so terrible in Baghdad that my friend whose neighborhood has been under attack by one of the Shia militias went to the main bus station in the capital in order to look into leaving. This is a man who when I've requested he leave for his own safety told me, "Mr. Dahr, I cannot leave. My heart is in Baghdad."
This is what he wrote me about his trip to the bus station:
"Hafidh Al-Daqi is a square in Baghdad where the buses leave towards Amman and Damascus. It's in the middle of Baghdad near the broadcasting station. The area received attacks from personnel from the Interior Ministry for the third time, and the most recent attack (last week) was followed by twenty workers there being kidnapped. They were kidnapped by the Interior commandos while officials from that ministry denied any relation with it.
"Yesterday the area was attacked once more, and today I was there to see what was going on. I found hundreds of people from all generations with their bags ready to leave for Amman or Damascus. I was shocked to see all of these Iraqis leaving. I asked a 40-year-old man who sells tickets, Abdul Sattar Aboud, what it cost to ride on a bus of 40 people. He replied, "It's 120,000 Iraqi Dinar ($80 - The average monthly wage in Iraq is $150.) for a chair in an air conditioned coach, but people are ready to pay whatever is necessary in order to escape, since they are very eager to leave. There are no people coming back to Iraq, so that's why the prices are of little concern to them. My office was smashed ten days ago in the last attack. I lost three of my workers. I don't know who took them or where they are now.
The mother of one of those detained by the Interior commandos, 65-year-old Um Abass, was there looking for her son. She told me, "My son Abbas was working with this office for three years. He is in his middle thirties, married with three kids, and he was very satisfied to work here so he could feed his wife and three kids. Only God knows how they are going to live with no supporter now. I won't leave this office unless my son comes back. Our neighbors are looking for him every day. They go to the morgue daily, and whenever they hear a body has been found anywhere. All we have is God to look out for us now. I blame the government for this lack of security. Why do the commandos come with their official cars and kidnap those who are not responsible for any of the violence?"
She started to cry. She was moaning for her son.
A manager at the bus terminal, 70 year-old Ahmed Alwan told me there were no vacancies. "You cannot find a seat now, and reservations for them for the next ten days on all our vehicles are impossible," he told me when I asked about buying a ticket. "Come back in a week and then we will give you the prices."
I asked him if there was any way to find a seat if I came back tomorrow. "No way," he replied. I asked what a seat cost now if one was available. "125,000 Iraqi Dinar ($83), and within a week it might be increased. Yesterday here the shootings were everywhere and scared the passengers. Everybody hid wherever there was a place to hide. Two of the passengers were injured and taken to the hospital. Yet still you see, despite the threat of being killed here, everyone is trying desperately to leave."
Meanwhile, the oil companies and other corporate cronies who the Bush cabal represents are making great progress in solidifying their presence in Iraq.
Dahr Jamail is an independent journalist who spent over 8 months reporting from occupied Iraq. He presented evidence of US war crimes in Iraq at the International Commission of Inquiry on Crimes Against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York City in January 2006. He writes regularly for TruthOut, Inter Press Service, Asia Times and TomDispatch, and maintains his own web site, dahrjamailiraq.com.
Copyright 2006 Truthout
*****
THE CONSORTIUM FOR INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM
Suite 102-231, 2200 Wilson Blvd.
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E-mail: consortnew@aol.com
Web: http://www.consortiumnews.com
- Tuesday, June 27, 2006 -
_________________________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________
By Robert Parry
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/062706.html
Author Ron Suskind's account of Dick Cheney's "one percent doctrine" -- the idea that if a terrorist threat is deemed even one percent likely the United States must act as if it's a certainty -- supplies a missing link in understanding the evolving madness of the Bush administration's national security strategy.
A one-percent risk threshold is so low that it negates any serious analysis that seeks to calibrate dangers within the complex array of possibilities that exist in the real world. In effect, it means that any potential threat that crosses the administration's line of sight will exceed one percent and thus must be treated as a clear and present danger.
The fallacy of the doctrine is that pursuing one-percent threats like certainties is not just a case of choosing to be safe rather than sorry. Instead, it can suck the pursuer into a swollen river of other dangers, leading to a cascading torrent of adverse consequences far more dangerous than the original worry.
For instance, George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq may have eliminated the remote possibility that Saddam Hussein would someday develop a nuclear bomb and share it with al-Qaeda. (Some intelligence analysts put that scenario at less than one percent, although Bush called it a "gathering danger.")
But the U.S. military invasion of Iraq had the unintended consequence of bolstering the conviction in North Korea and Iran that having the bomb may be the only way to fend off the United States.
The unending scenes of bloodshed in Iraq also have inflamed anti-American passions in other Middle East countries, including Pakistan which already possesses nuclear weapons and is governed by fragile pro-U.S. dictator Pervez Musharraf.
So, while eradicating one unlikely nightmare scenario -- Hussein's mushroom cloud in the hands of Osama bin-Laden -- the Bush administration has increased the chances that the other two points on Bush's "axis of evil," North Korea and Iran, will push for nuclear weapons and that Pakistan's Islamic fundamentalists, already closely allied with Osama bin-Laden, will oust Musharraf and gain control of existing nuclear weapons.
In other words, eliminating one "one-percent risk" may have created several other dangers which carry odds of catastrophe far higher than one percent. Bush now must decide whether to swat at these new one-plus-percent risks, which, in turn, could lead to even greater dangers.
Say, for example, that Bush orders air strikes against Iran's suspected nuclear sites and kills large numbers of civilians in the process. That could trigger riots in Pakistan and lead to Musharraf's downfall, putting Islamic extremists in control of nuclear weapons immediately, instead of possibly years into the future.
An attack on Iran also could backfire on the United States in Iraq, where Iranian-allied Shiite militias could retaliate against vulnerable U.S. and British troops, raising the death toll and endangering the entire U.S. mission in Iraq.
Swallowing Flies
In effect, Bush has found himself in a geopolitical version of "the little old lady who swallowed a fly." As the children's ditty goes, the little old lady next swallows a spider to catch the fly but soon finds that the spider "tickles inside her." So, she engorges other animals, in escalating size, to eliminate each previous animal. Eventually, she swallows a horse and "is dead of course."
Similarly, if Bush seeks to eradicate a succession of one-percent threats, he could well find himself trapped within a growing web of interrelated consequences, each pulling in their own entangling complexities. The end result could leave the United States in a much worse predicament than when the process began.
Charging headstrong after one-percent risks also makes you vulnerable to getting lured into traps. Al-Qaeda strategists, for instance, understood that the 9/11 attacks would lead to a furious reaction from the United States and welcomed the prospect that the American military would strike back at targets in the Islamic world.
Al-Qaeda hoped that the United States would overreact and thus sharpen what al-Qaeda saw as the contradictions within the Islamic world, forcing Muslims to take sides either with the "crusaders" and their regional allies or with the revolt against those forces.
Al-Qaeda's gamble was that the United States might strike a well-aimed, powerful blow that would eliminate al-Qaeda's leadership and its key supporters without alienating the larger Muslim populations.
But in late November and early December 2001, the failure to cut off escape routes at Tora Bora, near the Afghan-Pakistani border allowed Osama bin-Laden to evade capture along with Ayman al-Zawahiri, al-Qaeda's second in command.
Then, Bush -- prematurely celebrating victory in Afghanistan -- shifted the U.S. military's focus to Iraq, which had long been an obsession with Bush and his neoconservative advisers. Bush and Cheney judged that Saddam Hussein represented another one-percent-plus danger that required eliminating.
Perception Management
But there remained a political problem in the United States. The American people, while strongly favoring retaliation against al-Qaeda, were less convinced about the need to launch a series of "preemptive wars" against nations that were not implicated in 9/11.
Though the "one-percent doctrine" may transcend the need for any hard evidence among policymakers, it did not eliminate the political need to generate public support behind a war effort, especially when even casual observers could note that the new target country -- Iraq -- posed no immediate threat to the United States.
So, the Bush administration saw little choice but to engage in exaggerations and outright falsehoods, what the CIA calls "perception management." Bush, Cheney and their subordinates spoke in absolute terms about evidence of the Iraqi threat, including vast stockpiles of terrifying unconventional weapons and secret work on a nuclear bomb.
"Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction," Cheney told a VFW convention on Aug. 26, 2002. "There is no doubt he is amassing them to use against our friends, against our allies, and against us. And there is no doubt that his aggressive regional ambitions will lead him into future confrontations with his neighbors -- confrontations that will involve both the weapons he has today, and the ones he will continue to develop with his oil wealth."
It's now clear that Cheney was wildly overstating the level of confidence within the U.S. intelligence community about Hussein's WMD programs. There was little hard evidence at all, more a case of conventional wisdom about unconventional weapons than actual intelligence reporting.
CIA analysts also didn't believe that Hussein had any intent of using whatever WMD he did have unless his nation was attacked or he was cornered.
But intelligence took on a different dimension inside the "one-percent doctrine," a strategy that cherished action over information. In the new book, The One Percent Doctrine, Suskind describes Cheney first enunciating his new approach when he heard about Pakistani physicists discussing nuclear weapons with al-Qaeda.
"If there's a one percent chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response," Cheney said. "It's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence. ... It's about our response."
Suskind reports that Cheney's new "standard of action ... would frame events and responses from the administration for years to come. The Cheney Doctrine. Even if there's just a one percent chance of the unimaginable coming due, act as if it is a certainty. ...
"This doctrine -- the one percent solution -- divided what had largely been indivisible in the conduct of American foreign policy: analysis and action. Justified or not, fact-based or not, 'our response' is what matters. As to 'evidence,' the bar was set so low that the word itself almost didn't apply."
Manipulation
By making careful evaluation of the evidence irrelevant, however, the U.S. government made itself vulnerable to willful deceptions by interested parties, such as Ahmed Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress, which easily could funnel enough disinformation into the decision-making process to push decisions over the one-percent brim.
American enemies also could manipulate the process by exaggerating their goals. For instance, Bush and Cheney have repeatedly defended the continuation of the U.S. military operation in Iraq by citing the supposed goal of Islamic extremists to build an empire from Spain to Indonesia.
But the real prospect for such an empire is miniscule, arguably close to zero. After all, prior to 9/11, nearly all key al-Qaeda leaders had been driven from their home countries and chased to Afghanistan, one of the most remote corners of the earth.
These al-Qaeda leaders had lost battles with fellow Muslims in Egypt, Algeria, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere. Though heroes to some Islamists, al-Qaeda leaders were dangerous but fringe operatives on the run.
Without the clumsy intervention of the United States and Great Britain in Iraq, al-Qaeda had few prospects for any significant expansion of its power base.
In an intercepted letter, purportedly written in 2005 by Zawahiri to Jordanian terrorist Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in Iraq, al-Qaeda's second in command fretted about the problems that would occur if the United States military withdrew from Iraq.
The "Zawahiri letter" cautioned that an American withdrawal might prompt the "mujahedeen" in Iraq to "lay down their weapons, and silence the fighting zeal." To avert this military collapse if the United States did leave, the letter called for selling the foreign fighters on a broader vision of an Islamic "caliphate" in the Middle East, although only along the eastern shore of the Mediterranean, nothing as expansive as a global empire.
But the "Zawahiri letter" indicated that even this more modest "caliphate" was just an "idea" that he mentioned "only to stress ... that the mujahedeen must not have their mission end with the expulsion of the Americans from Iraq." [See Consortiumnews.com's "Bush's Latest Iraq War Lies."]
Brer Rabbit
In other words, assuming the "Zawahiri letter" is accurate, al-Qaeda's leaders wanted to keep the United States bogged down in Iraq because that allowed the terrorists to swell their ranks with new fighters and to use the Iraq War as a training ground to harden them into dangerous militants.
The one-percent doctrine, therefore, empowers America's enemies to influence U.S. policy in ways favorable to them. It lets al-Qaeda play the role of Brer Rabbit from the Uncle Remus tales, where the wily rabbit begs not to be thrown into the briar patch when that is exactly where he wants to go.
Bush has said the United States must take the word of the enemy seriously and act accordingly. But what if the enemy is exaggerating his capabilities or his goals? Do the enemy's words alone push matters beyond the one percent threshold and force the United States into responses even if they are not in America's best interests?
The one-percent doctrine is also developing a domestic corollary. Any home-grown threat -- no matter how unlikely -- must bring down the full force of U.S. law enforcement, as happened in last week's arrest of seven young black men in Miami for a terrorist plot that one FBI official called more "aspirational than operational."
On June 23, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales conceded that the men had no weapons, no equipment and no real plans. Mostly, the seven seem to have been encouraged by an FBI informant posing as an al-Qaeda operative to talk loosely about waging a "full ground war" against the United States.
As absurd as this notion of a "full ground war" was -- given the hapless nature of the alleged warriors -- Gonzales said, "left unchecked, these homegrown terrorists may prove to be as dangerous as groups like al-Qaeda."
Gonzales's domestic declaration rang with an echo of Dick Cheney's one-percent doctrine. If there is the slightest risk of terrorist activities, "it's not about our analysis, or finding a preponderance of evidence," Cheney reportedly said. "It's about our response."
Obvious Flaws
But another curious aspect of this one-percent doctrine is how obvious its flaws are. Wouldn't even the most dimwitted foreign policy novice recognize the absurdity of striking out at one-percent risks around the world?
John Dunne wrote that "no man is an island, entire of itself," meaning that every person is connected to other people. But surely, not even George W. Bush thought that Iraq was an island, somehow disconnected from a host of intersecting regional and global relationships.
The answer to that conundrum might simply be that the one-percent doctrine is less a doctrine than another excuse used by the Bush administration to justify actions, such as invading Iraq, that it always wanted to do.
If the slimmest possibility of grievous harm -- such as Saddam Hussein developing nuclear weapons and then slipping one to Osama bin-Laden -- can be cited to trump more circumspect policymakers, then it could be a powerful way to defeat bureaucratic rivals who show up at meetings with binders of intelligence analyses under their arms.
Then, when Bush and Cheney want to ignore other threats, they can simply revert to the posture of careful leaders not ready to jump hastily into an unfamiliar thicket. In other words, whether or not to invoke the one-percent doctrine gives them the ultimate debate-stopping argument.
Nevertheless, if Suskind is right and Bush is following the one-percent doctrine as his guiding light in the post-9/11 world, the American people can expect to find themselves led into an endless series of wars that only worsen the dangers.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
Copyright 2006 The Consortium for Independent Journalism
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WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
Published by the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI)
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- Wednesday, 28 June 2006 -
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Manufacturing "terror" as a means of intimidation
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News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/miam-j28.shtml
By Bill Van Auken
Within 48 hours of the US Justice Department's startling announcement Friday of the round-up of a "home-grown" terrorist cell in Miami, the media had all but dropped the story.
Its initial response, particularly that of the broadcast news outlets, was to amplify the government's lurid charges, warning of a conspiracy "even worse than September 11," including a supposed plot to blow up the nation's tallest building, the Sears Tower in Chicago. The television news channels carried live shots of the building, as if hijacked airplanes were about to plow into them.
As details of the supposed plot and the identity of the alleged conspirators came more sharply into focus, however, the media backed away. Not only was the Chicago skyscraper in no danger, there also existed no plot, much less the means of carrying one out. The entire government case was so manifestly bogus that not even the right-wing fabulists at Fox News could sustain it.
Nevertheless, the initial sensationalism and fear-mongering had an effect. By the time public defenders were appointed for the seven men indicted in the case, the attorneys' protests that their clients were victims of blatant government entrapment received a minute fraction of the attention given the government's "terror" charges at the outset.
Who are the seven young men--Narseal Batiste, 32, Patrick Abraham, 26, Burson Augustin, 21, Rothschild Augustine, 22, Naudimar Herrera, 22, Lyglenson Lemorin, 31, and Stanley Grant Phanor, 31--whose mug shots were broadcast into millions of American homes as the supposed new "face of terror?" They include a former Federal Express driver, two Haitian immigrants--one a legal resident and the other undocumented--and several other individuals from Miami's deeply impoverished and predominantly black Liberty City neighborhood.
What will happen to them? Despite the transparent attempts by both the government and the media to "lower expectations" in relation to the case, and the near unanimous view of the legal community that the case is at best "thin" and at worst a crude exercise in state provocation and entrapment, the seven defendants remain in federal lockup. They face the very real threat of spending the rest of their lives in prison for the sole "crime" of having allowed themselves to be drawn into supposedly incriminating conversations with an undercover FBI informant/agent provocateur.
There was neither criminal action nor a credible plan to commit a criminal act. No explosives and not a single weapon were found in the raids carried out by FBI SWAT teams in Miami. As one federal official put it, the "plot" was "more aspirational than operational."
The real question is whose "aspirations" played the decisive role in this episode--those of the defendants, or those of the government? There is every indication that by means of a provocation in Miami--the latest in a long line of similar cases--the government was pursuing definite political objectives of the most reactionary sort, with chilling indifference towards the fate of those it ensnared in its fabrication of a "terrorist threat." As far as the organizers of Bush's "global war on terror" are concerned, the seven young men from Liberty City were utterly disposable people.
If there is anything unique about the Miami case, it is the fact that the victims of the provocation are non-Muslim African Americans in the poorest neighborhood in one of America's poorest cities, rather than immigrants from Islamic countries. The modus operandi is not new. It has been employed by the federal authorities in case after case. In each of them, highly motivated agent provocateurs--some paid hundreds of thousands of dollars, others offered leniency on criminal charges--were dispatched to produce a "terrorist threat" where none existed.
To cite just a few of the more prominent cases:
* The conviction last month of 24-year-old Shahawar Matin Siraj, a Pakistani immigrant in New York City, for a supposed conspiracy to bomb the 34th Street subway station and other targets. The "plot" was the handiwork of a paid informant of the New York City police intelligence division, who earned $100,000 for ensnaring Siraj and another man, both of whom pleaded guilty before trial. Again, there was neither a criminal act nor any means of committing one--no weapons, no explosives. The informant apparently was the one who first suggested the bombing plot, then offered to obtain explosives and egged on the defendants by showing them pictures of Iraqis tortured by US guards at Abu Ghraib.
* In May of last year, two African-American Muslims, Dr. Rafiq Sabir, a Florida physician, and Tarik Shah, a well-known jazz musician, were arrested on charges of offering assistance, in the form of medical care and martial arts training, to Islamists waging "jihad." Once again, the entire case is based on alleged conversations with a government informant, who, as in the Miami case, supposedly administered an oath of allegiance to Al Qaeda. Again, no bombs, no weapons, no acts, merely a paid informant entrapping two innocent men in allegedly incriminating conversations.
* In Lodi, California, the FBI obtained the convictions of an ice cream vendor and his son, both Pakistani immigrants, through the work of another informant, who was reportedly recruited from a $7-an-hour job at a convenience store and paid nearly $250,000 to infiltrate the local Muslim community and entrap the pair. The charge against them of lending material support to terrorism was based upon telephone conversations in which the informant urged the younger man to attend an Al Qaeda training camp in Pakistan, though there was no evidence that he ever did so.
* A local Muslim cleric and a pizzeria owner in Albany, New York are to go on trial in September in a case involving a convoluted--and fictitious--scheme to purchase a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, supposedly to assassinate a Pakistani official. The entire "plot" was concocted by an FBI informant for the purpose of ensnaring the pair. He sprung it on them after the pizzeria owner asked him for a $5,000 loan to bail out his bankrupt business. The informant offered to let him keep $5,000 if he agreed to hold onto $50,000 that was supposedly to be used to buy the grenade launcher. Again, there was no act of violence, no means of carrying out such an act, no ties to terrorist groups and no plot, outside of the one invented by the FBI.
Each of these "terror cases" has received the same treatment from the media as the Miami arrests--screaming headlines and sensationalist broadcast claims echoing the government charges, followed by relative silence as it became clear that the accusations lacked any substance and that the defendants never posed the slightest threat to anyone.
What begins to emerge is a picture of a "homeland security" police-bureaucratic dictatorship that acts with unspeakable cruelty, destroying people--for the most part poor, hapless immigrants--to further patently political aims.
The main target of these exercises is not the defendants--they are merely collateral damage. It is the American people as a whole. This is a government of ruthless men that stages provocation after provocation with the aim of spreading fear and intimidating popular opposition to policies of aggressive war abroad and social reaction and attacks on democratic rights at home.
For nearly five years, the Bush administration has implemented virtually all of its policies in the name of a "global war on terrorism." It has relentlessly invoked the horrific loss of life in the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 as justification for a long-planned war to conquer Iraq and its oil wealth, and the arrogation of unprecedented dictatorial powers by the White House. The ostensible political opposition in the Democratic Party has fully embraced the "war on terror," while occasionally arguing that it is being mismanaged by the Bush administration.
The fact remains that every supposed terrorist threat foisted upon the public by the administration has proven to be a government-orchestrated provocation. The events of September 11 themselves have never been seriously investigated. How and why the government in Washington allowed them to take place--despite ample forewarnings of impending attacks involving the use of hijacked commercial jets as bombs, and even surveillance of the hijackers by US intelligence--has yet to be explained to the American people.
The need to sow fear and intimidate public opinion with supposed terrorist threats grows in direct proportion to the decline of popular support for the policies of both major parties, a political shift that can find no means of expression within the existing political setup. The way in which these provocations are organized and executed is evidence of an absolutely ruthless government that is bound neither by scruples nor serious scrutiny on the part of Congress, the courts or the media.
To the extent that schemes like the latest indictments in Miami are so quickly and thoroughly revealed--despite the best efforts of the mass media--to be shams, the threat grows that the desperate elements in control of the US government will organize something more convincing, in the form of an actual terrorist incident that, like September 11, will claim the lives of innocent Americans.
Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.
*****
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6. THE NEW HISTORY OF THE WEATHER UNDERGROUND
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MONTHLY REVIEW
June 2006
http://www.monthlyreview.org/0606jacobs.htm
by Ron Jacobs
Dan Berger, Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity (San Francisco: AK Press, 2006), 450 pages, paperback, $20.00.
Despite its many detractors and small numbers, the Weather-man/Weather Underground Organization has emerged in the past ten years as a major topic in the growing history of the 1960s. Many of those who knew the group during its existence--personally or in name only--often wonder why this is so. After all, goes this train of thought, Weatherman/Weather Underground represented all that was wrong with the movement against the war in Vietnam and against racism. The group encouraged violence and represented the epitome of arrogance. What about the rest of us?
As the author of the first of a number of recent books about the Weather Underground Organization (WUO), I heard this refrain quite often during the small book tour I took after the publication of my book back in 1997. The only answer I felt necessary to provide then was that if we truly wanted to understand history, then we must examine it all. This meant that WUO was worth examining along with the New Mobe, SCLC, the Black Panthers, and all the other organizations and coalitions that were part of the historical period known in the United States as the sixties. This answer is still met with resistance by those historians and nostalgia buffs that like to pretend that groups like the Panthers and WUO were aberrations and represent the "bad sixties" as opposed to the "good sixties" of Martin Luther King Jr., the early SDS, and George McGovern. Besides the obvious superficiality of this perception, it is also antipolitical.
The most recent book related to the WUO is Dan Berger's Outlaws of America: The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. In his introduction, Berger, a doctoral candidate at the University of Pennsylvania, political radical, and writer, makes it clear that he does not subscribe to the good sixties, bad sixties paradigm. Indeed, Berger understands quite well that "the 'dream' was killed, mostly by the state or by those acting in its interest...At the same time, cities across the country rose up in rebellion after rebellion. Therein lies one of the greatest fallacies of the Tale of Two Sixties: it obscures why people embraced radicalism and militancy. Without understanding the impact of state repression, radical movements don.t make sense." This historical accuracy informs Berger's text as he winds through the history of WUO and its successors. Furthermore, it informs his discussion of the meaning of that history for today's anti-imperialist activists.
The facts presented here are well-documented and were derived from a multitude of primary and secondary sources, as well as from personal interviews with former members of the WUO. The interviewees represented various positions within the organization itself and lend a credible insider's look at life in the political underground of the United States of the 1970s. In addition, the text denotes the larger debates within the movement and insists that people do make life-altering decisions based on politics--even in the United States of America.
Like any vibrant left organization, Weatherman/WUO constantly debated politics and tactics. This is reflected in their brief history. While the role of political violence (and the shape that violence should take) was fundamental to the group's formation and existence, even more important was its relationship with the struggle for black liberation in the United States. Indeed, not only was that relationship the reason for the group's birth, it was also the reason for the group's death according to Berger and those former members with whom he seems to agree.
So, what was the intended relationship between Weatherman/WUO and the black revolutionary struggle in the United States? If one takes a look at their founding document "You Don't Need a Weatherman..." one finds these words:
"The only third path is to build a white movement which will support the blacks in moving as fast as they have to and are able to, and still itself keep up with that black movement enough so that white revolutionaries share the cost and the blacks don't have to do the whole thing alone."
In other words, the primary role of the white revolutionary organization was to support the black revolution for liberation. This, in turn, meant that one's concept of black people's position in the United States and within the U.S. working class was the basis for any type of solidarity with other revolutionaries and activists. Were they just part of the working class? Did they experience a special oppression due to their race? Were they a separate nation? Weatherman subscribed to the latter argument: that African Americans were indeed a separate nation based on their special history and the nature of their oppression.
Once this relationship was understood within Weather, everything else followed. Its use of political violence was partially intended to take some heat off of revolutionary black groups like the Black Panthers, while its struggle "against the people" in the fall of 1969 was intended to draw a line between those who were willing to fight and die for the black revolution and those who weren't. Much like John Brown and his soldiers, Weatherman/WUO attempted to offer themselves to the struggle for black freedom in the United States.
After a Weatherman-sponsored week of protests and street fighting in Chicago in October 1969--a week that became known as the Days of Rage--Weather retreated and regrouped, ultimately deciding to wage a campaign of bombings and other armed attacks on law enforcement and the U.S. government. This meant that many members would go underground, many would leave the group, and some would operate as aboveground supporters. This entire process was accelerated when three members of the organization died in an explosion that occurred while one of the group was making bombs in the basement of a New York City townhouse on March 6, 1970. These deaths not only forced the remaining members underground, they also forced an organization-wide reevaluation of political violence, with a decision being made that the group would no longer adhere to their belief that the most violent action was necessarily the most revolutionary.
This decision was not lightly taken, and according to Berger's research, this decision widened some differences in the group between those who supported it and those who saw it as essentially taking advantage of their class and race position to lessen their personal danger. Apparently, part of the argument of those who disagreed with the decision was that they viewed their use of violence as a measure of sincerity and commitment to the black liberation struggle.
Berger begins each chapter of Outlaws of America with a quote from former member and prisoner David Gilbert, who is serving a seventy-five-year-to-life sentence for his role in the failed 1981 Brink's robbery outside of Nyack, New York. This expropriation was a joint effort of the Black Liberation Army and the May 19th Organization and resulted in the deaths of three police officers after the robbers were stopped during the getaway. Both of these organizations were small in numbers and committed to armed struggle. In addition, both were descended from the Black Panther Party and Weather Underground Organization, respectively. Gilbert was a Columbia University student when he joined SDS and was one of those Weather members most committed to both armed struggle and the theory that white-skinned people in the United States had no choice but to support the black revolutionary struggle as the only true revolutionary struggle.
The insistence that the oppression of black people in the United States was one of the fundamental (if not the fundamental) issues that white-skinned revolutionaries in the United States had to deal with was a position in the New Left that had to be confronted. It ultimately tore apart WUO as the organization tried to construct an approach to communist organizing that would work in the political climate after the end of the U.S. war in Vietnam. Berger's book subscribes to the argument that Weather's betrayal of its original pledge to build a "white revolutionary movement" to support the black revolutionary movement was the primary internal reason for the group's demise.
As mentioned previously, this argument holds that the reaction to the March 6, 1970, deaths and subsequent attempts to organize the political element of the sixties counterculture constituted but one more example of a U.S. leftist organization turning its back on the black struggle. To this element of the group, the prime example of this betrayal was the freeing of drug guru Timothy Leary from a California prison in September 1970. Why should Weather free a drug guru and not an imprisoned black liberation fighter? This analysis considered that "betrayal" to be exacerbated by the "New Morning" communique in December of that year--a statement full of counterculture rhetoric and language extolling the youth movement and its use of marijuana and psychedelics. The communique was criticized by the New York wing of the Panthers, whose communal experience with drugs was quite different than that of white middle-class youths.
By the time 1974 and 1975 rolled around, this critique had extended to WUO's attempts to provide a theoretical basis for its future via their publication known as Prairie Fire. This book, which is a succinct and reasonable examination of the state of the United States and the anti-imperialist movement, was seen as another betrayal of the group's original commitment to the black revolution. The Hard Times economic conference and the documentary film Underground were also attacked for similar reasons. Of course, by this time, it was not the primarily white counterculture that was the focus of WUO's organizing efforts. Like almost every other leftist formation in the United States by that time, their focus was shifting to the working class of the United States. Despite their analysis that acknowledged the multiracial makeup of the working class (as opposed to other groups like the Revolutionary Union that continued to view it as primarily white and male), the organization was sharply criticized as racist by an ad hoc people of color caucus at the Hard Times Conference who took aim at their aboveground allies, the Prairie Fire Organizing Committee (PFOC). For an organization that defined its very essence by its antiracism this criticism caused major cracks. Some WUO members continued to argue for a more traditional class-based organizing approach--an approach that removed much of the nation status previously ascribed to black people in the United States by WUO. The other members continued to insist on adhering to their revolutionary black nationalist-inspired analysis. Meanwhile, this ongoing debate was overshadowed by the necessity of individuals to stay together and help each other hide from law enforcement. The combination of the two phenomena led to a non-political period within the organization.
One of the advantages given Berger due to the timing of his research was the greater openness of former WUO members to talking about their experiences. Another was the greater availability of government documents detailing law enforcement operations against them and other antiwar and antiracist organizations during the 1960s and 1970s. Berger takes advantage of this and provides the reader with useful information and details about these actions. In today's world where government spying, torture, and persecution are the stuff of daily headlines, this information makes it clear that today's headlines are not new or aberrations. Indeed, they are business-as-usual for law enforcement, only with modern technological enhancements. Berger argues that the repression suffered by the black liberation and antiwar movements was a good part of the reason groups like WUO came into being. Not only were nonviolent and open tactics being shown to be ineffective, went the reasoning of those who went underground, they were providing the police with easy targets for arrest, harassment, and, in some cases, murder. The subsequent history of WUO and other such organizations, however, might seem to prove that their turn toward armed struggle rendered them even less effective than they were before they took that route.
Berger subtitles his book, The Weather Underground and the Politics of Solidarity. This is what most clearly separates this text from previous books about the WUO. Berger, being of the generation of radicals that came of age in the 1990s and the early twenty-first century, obviously has a different context than those who gained political awareness in earlier times. This is important because it informs the approach he takes in the book and also because it naturally leads to differing emphases regarding the period of history from which Weather sprang.
Berger's book is one of a very few current books that stresses the politics of racial solidarity. Although the movement against global capitalism is worldwide in scope and includes people of many nations (and consequently many skin tones), it has yet to span the racial divide in the United States in any noticeable way. The same can be said for the movement against the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan--although there are considerably more U.S. people of color involved in opposing the wars than in the movement against global capitalism.
However, as Berger points out, much of the impetus for today's struggle against U.S. imperialism and its excesses comes from "people of color, from Porto Alegre to Port-au-Prince, from Caracas to Chiapas, Durban to Detroit, Buenos Aires to Brooklyn, the West Bank to Washington." This is in part, as the WUO and other anti-imperialist groups of the early 1970s had already pointed out, because U.S. imperialism is the number one cause of injustice in the world.
Berger writes that the WUO's analysis of the role of prisons in capitalist society, the making of political prisoners, and the need for solidarity with prisoners remains as pertinent today as it was then. As the prison system run by the United States and its client states expands its role beyond serving as a dumping ground for those members of society no longer needed by capitalism into also serving as a holding-pen for those individuals singled out by the state as linked to potentially subversive and "terroristic" activities, the need to insist on the end of such prisons increases. Indeed, the ongoing revelations of mistreatment and murder at the various secret prisons run by the U.S. regime around the world make this insistence a matter of life and death for hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals whose primary crime is often merely being Muslim or Arab.
Outlaws of America measures the Weather Underground by its own yardstick: revolutionary solidarity with third world revolutionaries is the pathway to ending U.S. imperialism. By that definition, this means that the primary role of radicals in the United States is to support those revolutionaries, including those who comprise the black nation in the United States. Although one might disagree with this analysis and its limits, Berger argues that it was the attempt to follow through on this analysis that created the Weather Underground. Likewise, it was the attempt to follow through that caused its demise.
Ron Jacobs is an anti-imperialist activist and a writer. He is the author of The Way the Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground (Verso, 1997).
Copyright 2006 Monthly Review
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FREE MUMIA ABU-JAMAL! FREE LEONARD PELTIER!
FREE ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS & PRISONERS OF WAR!
END THE OCCUPATIONS!
ISRAEL OUT OF PALESTINE! U.S. OUT OF IRAQ!
U.S. investigations of top arms smugglers connected to the Russian-Israeli mafia have often met with stonewalling by senior officials of the Bush administration. According to a number of former Clinton administration officials, anytime a law enforcement or intelligence investigation leads to anything or anyone connected to the mafia, such as Viktor Bout and his network, the Bush administration shuts down the operation. Some law enforcement officials also suspect that the Russian-Israeli Mafia was behind a mysterious shorting of airline and insurance stocks shortly before 9-11. ... From his base in Sharjah in the Gulf, Bout was servicing Ariana Afghan Airline flights to Kandahar, Afghanistan. These flights were believed to be ferrying weapons and Al Qaeda and Taliban volunteers to Afghanistan, and the Clinton National Security Council believed Bout was aiding terrorism. ... But when the Bush administration took over...National Security Adviser Condoleeza Rice told U.S. intelligence to "look but don't touch." -- Wayne Madsen, Jaded Tasks: Brass Plates, Black Ops, & Big Oil [Walterville, OR: TrineDay, 2006] p. 174.
Contents: Number 733
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WORLD SOCIALIST WEB SITE
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- Saturday, 24 June 2006 -
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1. MIAMI 'TERROR' ARRESTS--A GOVERNMENT PROVOCATION
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News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2006/jun2006/miam-j24.shtml
By Bill Van Auken
There are many incongruities surrounding the arrest of seven men from the impoverished Liberty City neighborhood of Miami on charges of conspiracy to "wage war on the United States" that suggest it, like so many previous "terrorist plots" announced by the Bush administration, is a government-inspired provocation mounted for reactionary political ends.
None of the claims made by the government and repeated uncritically by the media concerning the arrest of these young working-class men can be accepted as good coin. Both the flimsiness of the criminal indictment and the lurid headlines surrounding it mark this event as an escalation in the anti-democratic conspiracies of the Bush administration.
There is every indication that this latest purported terrorist threat--described by some media outlets as "even bigger than September 11"--was manufactured by the FBI, which used an undercover agent posing as a terrorist mastermind to entrap those targeted for arrest.
While the Justice Department declared that the arrests had foiled a plot to blow up the tallest building in the US, the Sears Tower in Chicago, authorities in that city assured its residents that there had never been any threat to the structure.
The four-count indictment presented by the Justice Department in a Miami federal court on Friday contains not a single indication of an overt criminal act or even the means to carry one out. The brief 11-page document consists almost entirely of alleged statements made by the defendants to the FBI informant, referred to in quotes throughout the indictment as "the al Qaeda representative."
The government chose to consummate its entrapment plan by unleashing dozens of combat-equipped federal agents, dressed in olive drab fatigues and carrying automatic weapons, on the predominantly African-American Liberty City neighborhood, one of the poorest in the country. Liberty City was the scene of riots that broke out in 1980 after the acquittal of white police officers for the beating death of a black motorist.
On Thursday, the government's paramilitary squads confronted residents with pictures of the accused, demanding to know their whereabouts. The seven defendants are representative of the impoverished working class population of Miami, including Haitian immigrants.
It appears they were targeted by the FBI because they had formed a religious group, calling themselves the "Seas of David," which reportedly incorporated elements of Christianity and Islam. One of their crimes, according to the FBI's deputy director, John Pistole, was that the Seas of David "did not believe the United States government had legal authority over them."
According to some residents of the neighborhood, the group lived together in the warehouse that was raided by the FBI, using it for religious worship and as a base of operations for a construction business.
Elements of the federal indictment are so self-incriminating as to border on the ludicrous. Among the charges are that the defendants "swore an oath of loyalty to al Qaeda." Who administered this oath? The "al Qaeda representative," AKA, the paid informant of the FBI.
Aside from this "loyalty oath" solicited by the FBI, only one of the seven defendants is accused of any overt act, outside of driving the FBI informant to meetings.
The only action with which this one individual is charged--all else is words--is taking pictures of the FBI headquarters in Miami. Who supplied the camera? The "al Qaeda representative"--i.e., the FBI agent provocateur.
The indictment further charges two of the accused with driving "with the 'al Qaeda representative'" to a store in Dade County, Florida to purchase a memory chip for a digital camera to be used for taking reconnaissance photographs of the FBI building. The document does not say who paid for the chip, but there is hardly room for doubt.
In one of the more curious sections of the indictment, one of the accused, Narseal Batiste, is accused of asking the FBI informant to provide various items for his group, including footwear, for which he provided a "list of shoe sizes." Apparently the FBI delivered the shoes.
Pistole, the FBI deputy director, admitted that the supposed plots to blow up buildings had been "more aspirational than operational." In the raids carried out by the FBI squads, no weapons and no explosive substances were found.
"We preempted their plot," declared Pistole. But the indictment and the facts of the case indicate that the alleged plot would never have existed had the government not planned and instigated it in the first place.
At a Washington press conference, US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales acknowledged that the alleged plot had posed no actual danger. He claimed this was because the authorities had intervened "in its earliest stages."
So "early" was the preemption that officials associated with the supposed targets of the plot dismissed the government's indictment. Barbara Carley, the managing director of the Sears Tower, told the press, "Federal and local authorities continue to tell us they've never found evidence of a credible terrorism threat against Sears Tower that's ever gone beyond just talk."
Her remarks were echoed by Chicago Police Superintendent Phil Cline, who said, "There never was any credible threat to the Sears Tower at all."
In his press conference, Attorney General Gonzales asserted that the Miami group represented a "new brand of terrorism" created by "the convergence of globalization and technology."
What these words mean is anyone's guess. There is no indication that those charged, who were living in a warehouse in the poorest city in America, had access to any technology, and their supposed contact to the wider world was an informer planted by the FBI. The suggestion that the seven men were a "home-grown" terrorist group inspired by contact with Al Qaeda elements over the Internet is supported neither by evidence nor the charges contained in the government's own indictment.
R. Alexander Acosta, the United States attorney in South Florida, told the media that the defendants had "lived in the United States for most of their lives, but developed a hatred of America." This is presented as though it constituted evidence of a crime.
It is hardly surprising for someone living in Liberty City to hate the poverty and oppression that prevail there, or for Haitian immigrants to despise the imprisonment and repression that Washington metes out to those attempting to escape the brutal conditions imposed by US imperialism upon their homeland.
What is highly noteworthy is that the federal government decided to intervene in this situation to concoct a phony Al Qaeda connection and trumped up "terror plot."
What is the government's motive in manufacturing such a plot? Whose interests are served? Under conditions in which the majority of the American people have turned against the Iraq war and support the withdrawal of American troops, the Bush administration is desperately attempting to once again link its neo-colonial venture in Iraq with a supposed "global war on terror" waged to defend the American people against another 9/11.
To sustain such a fiction, fresh evidence of terrorist threats is periodically required. And it has been forthcoming on a regular basis. Every several months another "conspiracy" is unveiled, invariably involving an FBI informant and hapless individuals ensnared in a plot orchestrated by the government.
Until now, these "sting" operations have been targeted at Muslim immigrants. Last month, for example, Pakistani immigrant Shahawar Siraj in New York City was found guilty of plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station in a "plot" that the evidence indicated was based entirely on suggestions from an FBI informant. The FBI agent provocateur taunted the defendant with photographs of Abu Ghraib torture victims and demanded to know how, as a Muslim, he could fail to take action.
Similarly, in Albany, New York two years ago, the FBI recruited a Pakistani immigrant, promising him leniency on minor fraud charges, to ensnare two other immigrants in a fictitious scheme to help a non-existent person buy a weapon for a fake terrorist plot.
These provocations and conspiracies are symptomatic of a government that is both ruthless and desperate. Confronting a population that is increasingly hostile to its political agenda of reaction at home and war abroad, it is driven to manufacture an endless series of terrorist threats aimed at disorienting and intimidating public opinion.
Copyright 1998-2006 World Socialist Web Site. All rights reserved.
*****
THE CONSORTIUM FOR INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM
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- Saturday, June 24, 2006 -
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2. TERRORISTS IN MIAMI, OH MY!
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By Robert Parry
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/062406.html
The Bush administration finally took action against alleged terrorists living in plain sight in Miami, but they weren't the right-wing Cuban terrorists implicated in actual acts of terror, such as blowing a civilian Cuban airliner out of the sky. They were seven young black men whose crime was more "aspirational than operational," the FBI said.
As media fanfare over the arrests made the seven young men, many sporting dreadlocks, the new face of the terrorist enemy in America, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales conceded that the men had no weapons or explosives and represented "no immediate threat."
But Gonzales warned that these kinds of homegrown terrorists "may prove to be as dangerous as groups like al-Qaeda." [NYT, June 24, 2006]
For longtime observers of political terrorism in South Florida, the aggressive reaction to what may have been the Miami group's loose talk about violence, possibly spurred by an FBI informant posing as an al-Qaeda operative, stands in marked contrast to the U.S. government's see-no-evil approach to notorious Cuban terrorists who have lived openly in Miami for decades.
For instance, the Bush administration took no action in early April 2006, when a Spanish-language Miami television station interviewed Cuban terrorist Orlando Bosch, who offered a detailed justification for the 1976 mid-air bombing of a Cubana Airlines flight that killed 73 people, including the young members of the Cuban national fencing team.
Bosch refused to admit guilt, but his chilling defense of the bombing -- and the strong evidence that has swirled around his role -- left little doubt of his complicity, even as he lives in Miami as a free man, protected both in the past and present by the Bush family.
The Bush administration also has acted at a glacial pace in dealing with another Cuban exile implicated in the bombing, Luis Posada Carriles, whose illegal presence in Miami was an open secret for weeks in early 2005 before U.S. authorities took him into custody, only after he had held a press conference.
But even then, the administration has balked at sending Posada back to Venezuela where the government of Hugo Chavez -- unlike some of its predecessors -- was eager to prosecute Posada for the Cubana Airlines murders.
Summing up George W. Bush's dilemma in 2005, the New York Times wrote, "A grant of asylum could invite charges that the Bush administration is compromising its principle that no nation should harbor suspected terrorists. But to turn Mr. Posada away could provoke political wrath in the conservative Cuban-American communities of South Florida, deep sources of support and campaign money for President Bush and his brother, Jeb." [NYT, May 9, 2005]
Bush Family Ties
But there's really nothing new about these two terrorists -- and other violent right-wing extremists -- getting protection from the Bush family.
For three decades, both Bosch and Posada have been under the Bush family's protective wing, starting with former President George H.W. Bush (who was CIA director when the airline bombing occurred in 1976) and extending to Florida Gov. Jeb Bush and President George W. Bush.
The evidence points to one obvious conclusion: the Bushes regard terrorism -- defined as killing civilians to make a political point -- as justified in cases when their interests match those of the terrorists. In other words, their moral outrage is selective, depending on the identity of the victims.
That hypocrisy was dramatized by the TV interview with Bosch on Miami's Channel 41, which was cited in articles on the Internet by Venezuela's lawyer Jose Pertierra, but was otherwise widely ignored by the U.S. news media. [For Pertierra's story, see Counterpunch, April 11, 2006]
"Did you down that plane in 1976?" asked reporter Juan Manuel Cao.
"If I tell you that I was involved, I will be inculpating myself," Bosch answered, "and if I tell you that I did not participate in that action, you would say that I am lying. I am therefore not going to answer one thing or the other."
But when Cao asked Bosch to comment on the civilians who died when the plane crashed off the coast of Barbados in 1976, Bosch responded, "In a war such as us Cubans who love liberty wage against the tyrant [Fidel Castro], you have to down planes, you have to sink ships, you have to be prepared to attack anything that is within your reach."
"But don't you feel a little bit for those who were killed there, for their families?" Cao asked.
"Who was on board that plane?" Bosch responded. "Four members of the Communist Party, five North Koreans, five Guyanese." [Officials tallies actually put the Guyanese dead at 11.]
Bosch added, "Four members of the Communist Party, chico! Who was there? Our enemies..."
"And the fencers?" Cao asked about Cuba's amateur fencing team that had just won gold, silver and bronze medals at a youth fencing competition in Caracas. "The young people on board?"
Bosch replied, "I was in Caracas. I saw the young girls on television. There were six of them. After the end of the competition, the leader of the six dedicated their triumph to the tyrant. ... She gave a speech filled with praise for the tyrant.
"We had already agreed in Santo Domingo, that everyone who comes from Cuba to glorify the tyrant had to run the same risks as those men and women that fight alongside the tyranny." [The comment about Santo Domingo was an apparent reference to a strategy meeting by a right-wing terrorist organization, CORU, which took place in the Dominican Republic in 1976.]
"If you ran into the family members who were killed in that plane, wouldn't you think it difficult?" Cao asked.
"No, because in the end those who were there had to know that they were cooperating with the tyranny in Cuba," Bosch answered.
In an article about Bosch's remarks, lawyer Pertierra said the answers "give us a glimpse into the mind of the kind of terrorist that the United States government harbors and protects in Miami."
The Posada Case
Bosch was arrested for illegally entering the United States during the first Bush administration, but he was paroled in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush at the behest of the President's eldest son Jeb, then an aspiring Florida politician.
Not only did the first Bush administration free Bosch from jail a decade and a half ago, the second Bush administration has now pushed Venezuela's extradition request for his alleged co-conspirator, Posada, onto the back burner.
The downed Cubana Airlines flight originated in Caracas where Venezuelan authorities allege the terrorist plot was hatched. However, U.S. officials have resisted returning Posada to Venezuela because Hugo Chavez is seen as friendly to Castro's communist government in Cuba.
At a U.S. immigration hearing in 2005, Posada's defense attorney put on a Posada friend as a witness who alleged that Venezuela's government practices torture. Bush administration lawyers didn't challenge the claim, leading the immigration judge to bar Posada's deportation to Venezuela.
In September 2005, Venezuela's Ambassador Bernardo Alvarez called the 77-year-old Posada "the Osama Bin Laden of Latin America" and accused the Bush administration of applying "a cynical double standard" in its War on Terror.
Alvarez also denied that Venezuela practices torture. "There isn't a shred of evidence that Posada would be tortured in Venezuela," Alvarez said, adding that the claim is particularly ironic given widespread press accounts that the Bush administration has abused prisoners at the U.S. military base in Guatanamo Bay, Cuba.
Theoretically, the Bush administration could still extradite Posada to Venezuela to face the 73 murder counts, but it is essentially ignoring Venezuela's extradition request while holding Posada on minor immigration charges of entering the United States illegally.
Meanwhile, Posada has begun maneuvering to gain his freedom. Citing his service in the U.S. military from 1963-65 in Vietnam, Posada has applied for U.S. citizenship, and his lawyer Eduardo Soto has threatened to call U.S. government witnesses, including former White House aide Oliver North, to vouch for Posada's past service to Washington.
Posada became a figure in the Iran-Contra scandal because of his work on a clandestine program to aid Nicaraguan contra rebels fighting Nicaragua's leftist Sandinista government. The operation was run secretly out of the White House by North with the help of the office of then-Vice President George H.W. Bush.
Posada reached Central America in 1985 after escaping from a Venezuelan prison where he had been facing charges from the 1976 Cubana Airlines bombing. Posada, using the name Ramon Medina, teamed up with another Cuban exile, former CIA officer Felix Rodriguez, who reported regularly to Bush's office.
Posada oversaw logistics and served as paymaster for pilots in the contra-supply operation. When one of the contra-supply planes was shot down inside Nicaragua in October 1986, Posada was responsible for alerting U.S. officials to the crisis and then shutting down the operation's safe houses in El Salvador.
Even after the exposure of Posada's role in the contra-supply operation, the U.S. government made no effort to bring the accused terrorist to justice.
Secret History
As for the Cubana Airlines bombing, declassified U.S. documents show that after the plane was blown out of the sky on Oct. 6, 1976, the CIA, then under the direction of George H.W. Bush, quickly identified Posada and Bosch as the masterminds of the Cubana Airlines bombing.
But in fall 1976, Bush's boss, President Gerald Ford, was in a tight election battle with Democrat Jimmy Carter and the Ford administration wanted to keep intelligence scandals out of the newspapers. So Bush and other officials kept the lid on the investigations. [For details, see Robert Parry's Secrecy & Privilege.]
Still, inside the U.S. government, the facts were known. According to a secret CIA cable dated Oct. 14, 1976, intelligence sources in Venezuela relayed information about the Cubana Airlines bombing that tied in anti-communist Cuban extremists Bosch, who had been visiting Venezuela, and Posada, who then served as a senior officer in Venezuela's intelligence agency, DISIP.
The Oct. 14 cable said Bosch arrived in Venezuela in late September 1976 under the protection of Venezuelan President Carlos Andres Perez, a close Washington ally who assigned his intelligence adviser Orlando Garcia "to protect and assist Bosch during his stay in Venezuela."
On his arrival, Bosch was met by Garcia and Posada, according to the report. Later, a fundraising dinner was held in Bosch's honor during which Bosch requested cash from the Venezuelan government in exchange for assurances that Cuban exiles wouldn't demonstrate during Andres Perez's planned trip to the United Nations.
"A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, 'we are going to hit a Cuban airplane,' and that 'Orlando has the details,'" the CIA report said.
"Following the 6 October Cubana Airline crash off the coast of Barbados, Bosch, Garcia and Posada agreed that it would be best for Bosch to leave Venezuela. Therefore, on 9 October, Posada and Garcia escorted Bosch to the Colombian border, where he crossed into Colombian territory."
The CIA report was sent to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, as well as to the FBI and other U.S. intelligence agencies, according to markings on the cable.
A Round-up
In South America, investigators began rounding up suspects in the bombing.
Two Cuban exiles, Hernan Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, who had left the Cubana plane in Barbados, confessed that they had planted the bomb. They named Bosch and Posada as the architects of the attack.
A search of Posada's apartment in Venezuela turned up Cubana Airlines timetables and other incriminating documents.
Posada and Bosch were arrested and charged in Venezuela for the Cubana Airlines bombing, but the men denied the accusations. The case soon became a political tug-of-war, since the suspects were in possession of sensitive Venezuelan government secrets that could embarrass President Andres Perez. The case lingered for almost a decade.
After the Reagan-Bush administration took power in Washington in 1981, the momentum for fully unraveling the mysteries of anti-communist terrorist plots dissipated. The Cold War trumped any concern about right-wing terrorism.
By the late 1980s, Orlando Bosch also was out of Venezuela's jails and back in Miami. But Bosch, who had been implicated in about 30 violent attacks, was facing possible deportation by U.S. officials who warned that Washington couldn't credibly lecture other countries about terrorism while protecting a terrorist like Bosch.
But Bosch got lucky. Jeb Bush, then an aspiring Florida politician, led a lobbying drive to prevent the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service from expelling Bosch. In 1990, the lobbying paid dividends when Jeb's dad, President George H.W. Bush, blocked proceedings against Bosch, letting the unapologetic terrorist stay in the United States.
In 1992, also during George H.W. Bush's presidency, the FBI interviewed Posada about the Iran-Contra scandal for 6 1/2 hours at the U.S. Embassy in Honduras.
Posada filled in some blanks about the role of Bush's vice presidential office in the secret contra operation. According to a 31-page summary of the FBI interview, Posada said Bush's national security adviser, Donald Gregg, was in frequent contact with Felix Rodriguez.
"Posada ... recalls that Rodriguez was always calling Gregg," the FBI summary said. "Posada knows this because he's the one who paid Rodriguez' phone bill." After the interview, the FBI agents let Posada walk out of the embassy to freedom. [For details, see Parry's Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & Project Truth.]
More Attacks
Posada soon returned to his anti-Castro plotting.
In 1994, Posada set out to kill Castro during a trip to Cartagena, Colombia. Posada and five cohorts reached Cartagena, but the plan flopped when security cordons prevented the would-be assassins from getting a clean shot at Castro, according to a Miami Herald account. [Miami Herald, June 7, 1998]
The Herald also described Posada's role in a lethal 1997 bombing campaign against popular hotels and restaurants inside Cuba that killed an Italian tourist. The story cited documentary evidence that Posada arranged payments to conspirators from accounts in the United States.
Posada landed back in jail in 2000 after Cuban intelligence uncovered a plot to assassinate Castro by planting a bomb at a meeting the Cuban leader planned with university students in Panama.
Panamanian authorities arrested Posada and other alleged co-conspirators in November 2000. In April 2004, they were sentenced to eight or nine years in prison for endangering public safety.
Four months after the sentencing, however, lame-duck Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso -- who lives in Key Biscayne, Florida, and has close ties to the Cuban-American community and to George W. Bush's administration -- pardoned the convicts.
Despite press reports saying Moscoso had been in contact with U.S. officials about the pardons, the State Department denied that it pressured Moscoso to release the Cuban exiles. After the pardons and just two months before Election 2004, three of Posada's co-conspirators -- Guillermo Novo Sampol, Pedro Remon and Gaspar Jimenez -- arrived in Miami to a hero's welcome, flashing victory signs at their supporters.
While the terrorists celebrated, U.S. authorities watched the men -- also implicated in bombings in New York, New Jersey and Florida -- alight on U.S. soil. As Washington Post writer Marcela Sanchez noted in a September 2004 article about the Panamanian pardons, "there is something terribly wrong when the United States, after Sept. 11 (2001), fails to condemn the pardoning of terrorists and instead allows them to walk free on U.S. streets." [Washington Post, Sept. 3, 2004]
But a whole different set of standards is now being applied to the seven black terrorism suspects in Miami. Even though they had no clear-cut plans or even the tools to carry out terrorist attacks, they have been rounded up amid great media hoopla.
The American people have been reassured that the terrorists in Miami have been located and are being brought to justice.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His new book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
Copyright 2006 The Consortium for Independent Journalism
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A former Internet expert for the FCC reveals how the National Security Agency most likely conducted its top-secret spying
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SALON
News & Politics
June 23, 2006
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/23/internet_expert/
By Kim Zetter
A federal court in California released a previously sealed 40-page document on Thursday in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's lawsuit against AT&T, which bolsters allegations that the telecommunications giant built secret rooms to allow the National Security Agency to conduct widespread surveillance of Internet traffic. The document also paints a detailed scenario of how the NSA may be conducting the top-secret operation, which closely matches information given to Salon by a former AT&T employee who worked at the company's network operations center in Bridgeton, Mo.
The document, a statement by J. Scott Marcus, a former senior advisor for Internet technology to the Federal Communications Commission, was filed under seal on April 5 on behalf of the EFF to support its class-action suit against AT&T, which alleges that the company violated a number of federal laws in aiding the government's domestic spying operation against AT&T customers. The court sealed the document because it contained proprietary AT&T information, then ordered AT&T and EFF to work together to produce a redacted version to place in the public record, which they did on Thursday.
EFF asked Marcus to examine records from a former AT&T technician in California named Mark Klein that describe how AT&